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Financial independence is an important need for women in today’s world. However, women still face issues while taking control over their and their families’ finances.
Author and financial coach practitioner Lisa Barbora highlights how 15 women across age groups and life stages managed to overcome these obstacles and achieve financial freedom in her latest book, ‘Money & Her’. These stories include single women, married women, women with children, business owners, women planning for their retirement among others.
While talking to Cafemutual, Lisa shared her inspiration to write this book and the challenges faced by the women during their financial journey.
Inspiration for the book
While conducting workshops and interacting with women as a financial coach, Lisa observed a reluctance in them to take control of their and their families’ finances. She saw that women delegated the financial duties to another family member, usually male.
This inspired Lisa to write the book to share her belief that there is no excuse for women to transfer the management of their finances to a male family member. She also wants women to understand through her book that managing finances is not merely about numbers but about making choices.
Major challenges faced by women
According to Lisa, the traditional mindset among women that they do not need to manage or have a say in financial decision making is the main reason for their lack of financial freedom. She adds that many women have aversion to numbers, making them believe that learning the basics of finance is too difficult. In addition, she explains that women are overwhelmed with a lot of responsibilities in their personal lives like care taking, which combined with their professional lives makes them think that they do not need to manage one more aspect of their and their families’ lives. The tedious nature of managing finances also becomes an obstacle.
Challenges across life stages
Lisa shares the struggles she saw women face at different stages in their lives. For instance, single women are solely responsible for their long-term financial goals and they need to start allocating funds to meet them.
For married women, Lisa said that if anything goes wrong with marriage, it can become difficult to walk out of a troubled marriage without financial independence. She shares her experience of meeting women facing divorce in their 40s without having work or financial reserves.
During her research, Lisa also met women who own small businesses who had to face the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic due to loss of revenue or death of a husband.
How can women start their finance journey?
The experienced financial coach asks women to start their learning with simple steps like knowing the total income of their family, their investments, risk levels, debt levels and effects of inflation on them. She explains her reason for choosing these as the starting point as none of these aspects of finance require complex calculations and can be understood fairly easily.
Later, she asks women to understand the structure of their household finance, understanding how assets work and what can go wrong. She thinks that this basic understanding can go a long way to contributing to the welfare of the family as well.
She says that nobody else can build this knowledge for women and asks them to attain this knowledge through education investor awareness programs, financial coaches etc. She also thinks that seeking out the help of a coach or using online resources can be useful at the initial stage.
Message to MFDs
Lisa says that most of the women use mutual funds to achieve their financial goals. However, they are very emotional, trusting and conservative in their approach. So, MFDs should understand their financial goals and be transparent about the risk levels and the possible effects of the investment. She concludes by warning that non-transparence and lack of clear communication can lead to women shying away from future investment.
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